Job Search Tool: Jobs With Friends

As regular readers know, I like to occasionally spotlight job search tools and resources you might not be aware of, as well as job search trends that are gaining ground. “Jobs With Friends” came to my attention recently, and I thought it was worth highlighting. (Note: I haven’t used the service myself, since I’m not looking for a job; however, you can check it out risk-free, so I encourage you to do that.)

What is Jobs With Friends, and Why Should You Care?

A Q&A email exchange with Chris Russell, the CEO of Jobs With Friends, brought out the following information:

What is Jobs With Friends intended to do? Its purpose is to help job seekers “company hunt” for jobs through people already in their personal networks. Since referrals are the number one way people get hired, our platform empowers them to leverage their connections as never before. They are able to see where each person works, view available jobs (if there are any) and easily ask for a referral through a one-click, pre-written message that goes straight to their friend’s inbox (either Facebook or LinkedIn). It’s essentially a social job referral platform.

Who are the people most likely to benefit from using Jobs With Friends? I think anyone who is job hunting and has at least a few hundred connections on Facebook and LinkedIn is a candidate to use it. Jobs With Friends lends itself to any industry since everyone has a network.

How is Jobs With Friends different from/better than other services that might claim to do something similar? There are other job boards that let you sync your contacts but none of them provide our comprehensive toolset to ask for the referral, to research the company, and keep it all in one place. We combine your contacts into a single database and let you search/browse/filter all of those contacts.

Why is this needed? Because people who know someone at a company are 3-4 times more likely to be hired. It’s that simple.

What Should You Do with Jobs With Friends?

In answer to my question, “How can people use Jobs With Friends most effectively?,” Chris offered a short list of “do’s and don’ts”:

DO: Upload your resume so that when you ask for a referral, your friend can get a copy of it to hand in to their HR.

DO: Connect your LinkedIn account. We require you to connect with Facebook but don’t forget to sync your LinkedIn contacts as well to see the full view of your networks.

DO: Invite your friends to join (so you can see their contacts).

DO: Use the broad job search function that integrates the Indeed.com platform with your connections. Whenever you search Indeed, we’ll show you if you have any connections for the jobs in the search results.

DO: Use the handy research buttons for each company profile to get more info on the company.

DON’T: Forget to personalize the referral message to remind them where you met if you don’t know your contact personally.

DON’T: Send a referral message more than once. If you need to follow up you can do so through Facebook or LinkedIn later on.

Short recap: You need to have a Facebook account to get started, and you should fold your LinkedIn connections into the mix (you areon LinkedIn, right?) to get the maximum benefit. You should also be using Indeed.com (a popular job aggregator) to help you unearth job opportunities–Jobs With Friends is set up to interact with that platform.